The Facebook Marketing Guide for Financial Advisors

Facebook isn’t just for funny cat videos or seeing what your friends had for dinner last night. It’s also a marketing tool, and financial advisors can leverage Facebook marketing to generate a steady stream of ideal clients.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have Facebook working for you day and night, continuously bringing prospects into your business? Here are nine Facebook marketing tips to help you get there.

1. Your Facebook ads spend is an investment, not an expense.

Expenses are typically sunk costs. You’ll never get your money back from your dinner at Outback last night. That’s an expense. But when you’re showing your ad to people on Facebook, it’s an investment.

Sure, there are good investments and there are bad investments, but when you view Facebook marketing purely as an expense, you miss golden opportunities to expand your presence and win new business.

2. When you get a positive ROI, you need to expand as quickly as possible.

When it comes to Facebook marketing for financial advisors, one of the biggest mistakes I see advisors make is creating a set budget for Facebook ads. The intention may be good, but never spending more than a set dollar amount will hold you back.

Here’s why: let’s say that you spend $1 in ads and get $2 back. Would you stop and say, “I can’t spend more than my $1,000 budget?” Of course not! You would pump every dollar into the system until it stopped working.

It’s one thing to stop spending money on a losing ad. It’s another thing entirely to cut a winner when it’s performing. It would be a massive error to cut a marketing “expense” when it’s consistently delivering a positive ROI.

Your goal should be to figure out how much it costs you to acquire a client and how much money you make per client. Do whatever you have to do to figure out these numbers. Once you have this magical ratio, it will be your guiding light. From there, the only questions you should ask are, “How much can I scale this?” and “How quickly can I do it?”

3. Take advantage of your best performing content.

Facebook ads can be viewed as an amplification tool. You pick the message that you want to get out to the world, and Facebook will help you amplify it.

With that being said, one of the best (and safest) things for you to amplify is content that’s already doing well for you. Take your highest-converting page from your website and amplify it. Do you have a blog post that consistently gets more views, comments, shares, etc.? Amplify it! You already have solid proof that something is working for you, so it makes sense to get that in front of your target market as quickly as possible.

4. Timing matters.

Find out when your target market is on Facebook and post at those times for maximum engagement. Want to figure this out fairly quickly? Monitor your Facebook chat for the next week, making a note of how many people are “online” at different times of the day. Assuming that the people are representative of your target market, you can make a judgement pretty quickly.

Those targeting businesses almost always see higher engagement on weekdays, while those targeting consumers see an increase in engagement on the weekends.

Another rule of thumb is that the best days to post on Facebook are Thursday and Friday, with the best times being between 1 pm and 3 pm. Of course, don’t let that stop you from posting entirely. It’s better to have some people see you than nobody at all.

5. Always test your images.

When it comes to Facebook marketing and paid ads, you cannot be a know-it-all. Never assume that you know which ad will perform the best, because you likely don’t.

For example, I recently ran an ad for a free PDF giveaway. One image was a picture of a smiling man in a suit. The other image was a picture of the PDF itself, with the word “free” in big bold text. Now, most marketers will tell you that a happy, smiling face is one of the most clickable things on the web. It draws attention and gets people to take action.

But… the boring image of the PDF exceeded all my expectations. It literally performed 500% better than the happy face. So if I played the role of a know-it-all and refused to test my images, I would’ve been paying five times more than necessary. After running thousands of Facebook campaigns, I have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t (which gives me a running start) but I never make foolish assumptions.

One little test can save you thousands of dollars over the life of a campaign. Don’t neglect to do it.

6. Move people from rented land to owned land.

Facebook is rented land. You don’t own it or control it, you just operate on it. At any time they could change their rules (which they’ve done), limit your reach, or even worse… ban your account.

That’s why you need to get people away from this rented land and onto your website, the “owned land”. Ideally, you should be collecting email addresses and building your email list. Imagine having a prospect list (which you own and control) of 2,000 people that you can reach with a single click.

Take me, for example. I have a ton of content on LinkedIn. But I don’t build my entire brand on LinkedIn. I have links scattered throughout my social media posts that are designed to get people to my website. And once someone gets to my website, they are given several chances to give me their email in exchange for some pretty cool stuff. I’m not naïve enough to think that Facebook or LinkedIn will 100% for-sure let me play in their sandbox forever, which is why I’m building a massive email list. You should too.

7. Focus on clicks, ignore the rest.

Because your goal should be to get people away from the “rented land” and onto the “land” that you own, your Facebook ads should be centered on clicks to your website. Are there times and a places for likes, engagement, and all that? Sure, but 99% of the time your best bet will be focusing on clicks.

Over time, financial advisors will begin to see trends in their online marketing process. They might notice that out of every 100 clicks to their website, 10 people give them their contact information, or “’opt in”.

Let’s say that every click to the website costs 50 cents. Depending on your target market, this could be really cheap or ridiculously expensive, but I just picked an easy number. That means 100 clicks will cost you $50, and every warm lead costs you $10.

From there, you can run some more numbers. Let’s say that you set one appointment for every 3 leads. That’s $30 per appointment, or 3 X $10. Now let’s say that on average, you get one client from every three appointments you have. That means your cost to acquire a client is $90, or 3 X $30.

If you could acquire a client for $90 each, would you be profitable? It’s just simple math. You can tweak the formulas and ratios however you want to suit your situation, but the ideas are the same. If you want to figure out how this might apply to your business, feel free to reach out to me and we’ll discuss it.

The coolest part about this is that once you have a baseline number, you can work to lower the costs at every part in the chain. Lowered your cost-per-click? That goes to your bottom line. Increased your appointment ratio? That goes to your bottom line. Are you closing more of your appointments? You guessed it – that goes to your bottom line too!

Some people might be thinking, “What about the conversions objective?” Yes, conversions are good too, but I’ve found it much easier to lower my cost-per-click than to lower my cost-per-conversion through Facebook. Plus when I lower my cost-per-click, my cost-per-conversion goes down too.

8. Retargeting is easy money.

I can go to a financial advisor’s website and see in less than ten seconds if he/she is running a retargeting campaign. It’s one of my super-secret tricks. And when I approach the financial advisors who aren’t retargeting, I can explain to them how much money they’re leaving on the table.

In a nutshell, retargeting is basically showing your ads to people who are already familiar with you. Have you ever visited a website, like Amazon, and then saw ads for them all over the internet? That’s retargeting.

So imagine if someone visited your website and the timing was wrong. Maybe something came up. Maybe the person got distracted. But unless you captured the visitor’s email address, he/she is gone forever… unless you’re running a retargeting campaign.

Let’s say that same person got distracted or didn’t move forward for whatever reason. The next day, that person logs onto Facebook and sees a piece of your content, or perhaps a link to schedule an appointment with you. That person will be so much easier to convert than cold traffic. After all, the big idea behind retargeting audiences is that they’ve already engaged with you in some way.

You can also get as detailed as you want with this, meaning you can retarget people who have visited certain pages of your website or even your own email list. If your email open rate is 20%, that means 80% of those people are ignoring you in their inbox. You can take their email addresses, upload them to Facebook, and retarget them.

Setting up a retargeting campaign is one of the first things a financial advisor can do to get a big ROI increase.

9. Watch your ad frequency.

Frequency is the average number of times your ad was served to each person. One person could’ve seen your ad twice and another person sees your ad four times and another just once. However, once the numbers are large enough, these variations are irrelevant.

So if your ad has a frequency of 3, it means that the average person you’re targeting has seen your ad three times You want to watch this metric because as your frequency increases, you cost-per-click skyrockets. This makes sense – if people have already seen your ad three times and haven’t taken action, they probably won’t. So pause the ad and create a new one. Or target a different audience entirely. After all, you want to maximize your ROI, and a big part of that is keeping your costs in check.

Want me to help you maximize your Facebook ads? Reach out to me below to discuss how I can help you.